Bolstering youth mental health at one-stop shops

University of Otago researchers are involved in a collaborative research project to explore the mental health care offered at New Zealand’s Youth One-Stop Shops (YOSS), which provide primary health care for young people.

Dr Emily Cavana from the Department of Primary Health Care in the Faculty of Medicine – Wellington, who also works as a GP at a YOSS, says researchers will look at the mental health services offered by clinics located around the country from Auckland to Invercargill.

The clinics provide services in a holistic way, offering health, social services and counselling to young people. Most provide services free of charge to those aged between 10 and 24.

Emily says previous research has found that young people, particularly those with mental health or substance abuse issues, prefer health services designed specifically for them, where both mental health and substance use are addressed together with health care for their physical health needs.

The researchers will look at three key areas: how youth services are providing care for mental health and addiction; what mental health care looks like when it’s accessible for young people; and how the services help improve health outcomes and fairness in care.

Emily says the clients of YOSS services tend to be patients who are not well served by mainstream primary health care clinics, and are more likely to be on low incomes and from Māori, refugee or rainbow communities.

The two-year project, Integrated Care for Youth Mental Health Outcomes, (I’M YOUTH), is funded by a Cure Kids grant and is led by Associate Professor Kaaren Mathias from the University of Canterbury.

Kaaren says about 21 per cent of young people in Aotearoa experience serious mental-health problems, higher than the global average of 14 per cent. Māori and Pasifika youth face even higher rates of mental distress, and are also much more likely to attempt suicide than Pākehā youth.

The research project has been co-designed with the help of an advisory group of six young people and eight youth-focused health providers who run community-based Youth One-Stop Shops.

Kaaren says while YOSS services are well-used, and can improve equity in health outcomes, the mechanisms by which they achieve this are not well understood.

“Our research aims to understand how integrated youth services help address these issues.”

The team gathered on the Wellington campus in July to kick off the project. The researchers are Dr Jalal Mohammed (University of Canterbury), Associate Professor Ruth Cunningham (University of Otago, Wellington), Dr Rebecca Mitchell (University of Canterbury), Dr Jake Aitken (a GP and Teaching Fellow at the University of Otago, Wellington), Kaaren and Emily.

They will look at the services provided by Youth One-Stop Shops: the Village Collective, a Pacific youth health provider in Auckland; Taiohi Tūrama in Rotorua; Anamata in Taupō; Youth One-Stop Shop in Palmerston North; The 502 Rangatahi Ora, part of the Ora Toa group of clinics in the Porirua Kaupapa Māori service; Te Tahi Youth in Christchurch; and Number 10 in Invercargill.